Chalk this one up on the 'uh, what?'-list of acquisitions. Intel announced today that it has acquired Mcafee, the security and antivirus company we all know and love. The press release is a bit vague on why, exactly, Intel made this rather odd acquisition.

"I've never been a particular fan of security companies like McAfee, because they have the tendency to needlessly scare the living daylights out of people"

Agreed. Most of their home/business/enterprise products just as bad as malware when you want to remove them from your computer.

Antivirus companies are money oriented, they care more about the profit than producing actually good and useful products, not to mention how they bully with each other. You can always see their vulgar ads on their sites about how their competitors failed to counter xyz threats...

Would be better if people were start using linux instead of paying for companies like mcafee for their crapware.

"Would be better if people were start using linux instead of paying for companies like mcafee for their crapware.

Linux is not immune to malware, especially if you allow and run random programs downloaded from the internet on your system. A stupid Windows user can be a "just as stupid" Linux user. "

Except you have to be at least educated enough to know 'chmod +x' to anything you just download off the internet.

Then at least they'll only hose their own data, and as well they should, but it'd be difficult for a normal 'stupid' user to make his PC into a zombie for spammers for example.

Still, Linux is at the stage right now where even if some "stupid windows user" decided to use it instead of Windows, it'd more than likely because their Windows install has become crap because of malware one too many times, so they should be at least a bit more cautious when switching to Linux. But then again, most people at this point who switch to Linux are recommended to do so by a Linux user. So will hopefully be informed of such basic things.